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This paper aims to empirically investigate how cognitive biases influence employees' product creativity (EPC) and related product performance. In particular, the paper primarily studies (1) the direct effect of employees' implicit creativity – based on five cognitive biases – and explicit creativity on EPC; and (2) the mediating role of coworkers' heuristic transfer between shared leadership and EPC.

Data have been obtained from big Italian manufacturing technology firms through a series of online questionnaires that resulted in 555 answers from R&D employees and their direct managers, who are, respectively, involved and responsible for the proposal of manufacturing technology products. The developed four theoretical hypotheses have been tested through correlation analysis, hierarchical regression, mediation analysis and structured equation modelling.

Cognitive biases positively influence EPC in manufacturing technology firms, leading to positive product performance. In particular, implicit creative personality better predicts EPC than explicit creative personality; whilst, shared leadership leads to a cognitive convergence among co-workers through the spread of heuristics that positively influence EPC.

The originality of this work lies in having: (1) investigated the influence of cognitive biases in creativity, (2) hypothesized and proved that co-workers' heuristic transfer mediates the relationship between shared leadership and EPC; (3) conducted the first specific study on employees' creativity in manufacturing technology firms; and (4) first implemented the implicit creative personality measurement, apart from those who conceptualized it.

This study examines the effects of incremental and radical creativity on both product and process innovation by considering the moderating roles of knowledge sharing in intensity and quality.

Primary research is conducted over 250 employees from service and manufacturing firms operating in Pakistan. Principal component analyses are conducted for the data reduction process, and multiple regression analyses are performed to test the research hypotheses.

Knowledge sharing intensity and the quality of knowledge sharing moderate the effects of radical creativity on product and process innovation that predicts firm performance. Besides, the research presents the differences in the impacts of incremental and radical creativity with the moderations of organisational knowledge on product and process innovations between the service and manufacturing firms and implications for practitioners and researchers.

This work represents a sample from manufacturing and service firms operating in Pakistan. Still, caution is the generalising specific results to other organisations in either service or manufacturing domains or manufacturing.

While boosting creativity in organisations, knowledge sharing practices differ for sector domains. For service firms, knowledge intensity is essential, while knowledge quality is meaningful for manufacturing firms.

This study contributes to the literature at the crossroads of organisational creativity and innovation twofold; the first is to investigate the combined effects of incremental and radical creativity on product and process innovation separately. The second is to examine the moderator roles of knowledge sharing practices of knowledge quality and intensity while predicting product and process innovation with incremental and radical creativity.

The purpose of this paper is to apply the social cognitive theory and social learning theory to examine the different mechanisms through which entrepreneurs’ moral awareness and ethical behavior affect the product innovation of new ventures.

The authors collected survey data from 150 founders and 389 founding team members of new ventures in China in 2015. The final sample contained 113 questionnaires from entrepreneurs and 246 questionnaires from their founding team members. Regression analyses were used to test direct effects, and Preacher and Hayes’ (2004) formal mediation test approach with bootstrapping method was used to evaluate the mediation effects.

The findings indicate that the ethical levels of entrepreneurs can affect the product innovation of a new venture through two paths: entrepreneurs with low levels of moral awareness tend to be more individually creative, which facilitates product innovation, and entrepreneurs with high levels of ethical behavior can make founding teams more creative, which also promotes product innovation.

The findings of this study suggest that entrepreneurs are not negatively affected by their low moral awareness as long as they exhibit high ethical behavior with founding team members. But such low moral awareness has to be genuine. The best way to promote product innovation in the long run is to create an organizational culture of ethical behavior rather than to ignore moral issues in decision-making.

This study challenges the assumption that moral awareness and ethical behavior are always consistent. It takes an initial step to resolve the contradiction in the current literature regarding the relationship between the ethical levels of entrepreneurs and product innovation in the context of founders and founding teams in new ventures.

There has been little research discussing the role that new product creativity plays in achieving alliance ambidexterity and how causal ambiguity may be a potential moderator in the association between new product creativity and alliance ambidexterity. The purpose of this study is to identify the contingent role of causal ambiguity and examine the relationships between new product creativity, causal ambiguity and alliance ambidexterity.

In this empirical study, a questionnaire approach is used to collect data, and moderated structural equation modeling is used to test the hypotheses.

The findings indicate that new product creativity has a positive influence on alliance ambidexterity, whereas causal ambiguity moderates these associations. When causal ambiguity increases, the positive impact of new product creativity on alliance ambidexterity is attenuated.

This study integrates the ambidexterity literature and the alliance literature by applying the concept of ambidexterity to a strategic alliance context. The moderating role of causal ambiguity echoes previous research postulating causal ambiguity as a barrier to knowledge transfer in alliances. Given a higher level of causal ambiguity, firms face more difficulty when they attempt to develop new product creativity to achieve the desired level of alliance ambidexterity.

Managers could initiate incentive programs and build supportive environments that facilitate new product creativity. Firms will be capable of elaborating the potential of new product creativity to further facilitate alliance ambidexterity. Managers need to pay attention to causal ambiguity that may have a moderating influence on the relationship between new product creativity and alliance ambidexterity.

This study contributes to the synthesis of new product creativity and alliance ambidexterity and helps scholars and managers to better understand the moderating effect of causal ambiguity in the context of the innovation and ambidexterity literature.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between knowledge acquisition, dissemination, and innovation and new product creativity and to identify different hidden patterns in which knowledge acquisition, dissemination, and innovation affect new product creativity.

The paper employs additivity and variance stabilization analysis.

The new product creativity is significantly related to knowledge management.

The paper implies that if organizations fail to understand the subtle ways by which different dimensions of knowledge acquisition, dissemination, and innovation influence new product creativity, they may fail to harvest the full value of knowledge management in creativity improvement.

It is one of the first to assess the link between knowledge management and new product creativity.

This paper aims to investigate the impact of advertising creativity on consumer perceptions of product quality, value, retailer brand attitude and purchase intention.

Two experimental studies were conducted. Study 1 shows the impact of creativity (high/low) for two product categories (mineral water and chewing gum) and one known retailer. The findings are replicated and extended in Study 2 for four categories (mineral water, chewing gum, batteries and detergent) and two known retailers.

The results show that advertising creativity positively signals perceived product quality, which increases perceived value. These effects fully mediate a positive impact on retailer brand attitude and purchase intentions. The positive effect of advertising creativity on perceived product quality is mediated by perceived advertisement effort.

This study introduces advertising creativity as a way for retailers to increase perceived product quality and value. The results show that advertising creativity increases perceived effort on behalf of the sender, which positively influences purchase intentions.

The current study shows that advertising creativity can work as a signal of product quality, which has positive effects for retailers.

This study aims to investigate the role of team problem-solving creativity in new product development (NPD) in the bottom-of-the-pyramid (BoP) in business-to-business firms. This study synthesizes perspectives from NPD, creativity and leadership to examine how work-related factors such as NPD managers’ role ambiguity and individual-related factors such as CEO’s ambidextrous leadership style interact to determine team problem-solving creativity and its effect on new product performance (NPP).

The hypotheses are tested using data from a multi-informant survey of 274 middle-level managers within 137 local BoP manufacturing firms in a sub-Saharan African country.

The results show that an NPD team’s ability to solve problems creatively determines NPP in BoP markets. The findings also show that NPD managers’ role ambiguity has a negative effect on team problem-solving creativity. However, a CEO’s ambidextrous leadership neutralizes the negative impact of role ambiguity on problem-solving creativity.

This study combines three distinct streams of literature, including NPD, creativity and leadership, to explore the antecedents and outcomes of problem-solving creativity. Drawing on creativity and leadership theories, this study reports that the success of creative idea exchanges depends heavily on a supportive environment for NPD team members and minimizing the NPD manager’s role ambiguity.

The purpose of this paper is to present a fresh approach to stimulate individual creativity. It introduces a mathematical representation for creative ideas, six creativity operators and methods of matrix-algebra to evaluate, improve and stimulate creative ideas. Creativity begins with ideas to resolve a problem or tackle an opportunity. By definition, a creative idea must be simultaneously novel and useful. To inject analytic rigor into these concepts of creative ideas, the author introduces a feature-attribute matrix-construct to represent ideas, creativity operators that use ideas as operands and methods of matrix algebra. It is demonstrated that it is now possible to analytically and quantitatively evaluate the intensity of the variables that make an idea more, equal or less, creative than another. The six creativity operators are illustrated with detailed multi-disciplinary real-world examples. The mathematics and working principles of each creativity operator are discussed.

The unit of analysis is ideas, not theory. Ideas are man-made artifacts. They are represented by an original feature-attribute matrix construct. Using matrix algebra, idea matrices can be manipulated to improve their creative intensity, which are now quantitatively measurable. Unlike atoms and cute rabbits, creative ideas, do not occur in nature. Only people can conceive and develop creative ideas for embodiment in physical, non-physical forms, or in a mix of both. For example, as widgets, abstract theorems, business processes, symphonies, organization structures, and so on. The feature-attribute matrix construct is used to represent novelty and usefulness. The multiplicative product of these two matrices forms the creativity matrix. Six creativity operators and matrix algebra are introduced to stimulate and measure creative ideas. Creativity operators use idea matrices as operands. Uses of the six operators are demonstrated using multi-disciplinary real-world examples. Metrics for novelty, usefulness and creativity are in ratio scales, grounded on the Weber–Fechner Law. This law is about persons’ ability to discern differences in the intensity of stimuli.

Ideas are represented using feature-attribute matrices. This construct is used to represent novel, useful and creative ideas with more clarity and precision than before. Using matrices, it is shown how to unambiguously and clearly represent creative ideas endowed with novelty and usefulness. It is shown that using matrix algebra, on idea matrices, makes it possible to analyze multi-disciplinary, real-world cases of creative ideas, with clarity and discriminatory power, to uncover insights about novelty and usefulness. Idea-matrices and the methods of matrix algebra have strong explanatory and predictive power. Using of matrix algebra and eigenvalue analyses, of idea-matrices, it is demonstrated how to quantitatively rank ideas, features and attributes of creative ideas. Matrix methods operationalize and quantitatively measure creativity, novelty and usefulness. The specific elementary variables that characterize creativity, novelty and usefulness factors, can now be quantitatively ranked. Creativity, novelty and usefulness factors are not considered as monolithic, irreducible factors, vague “lumpy” qualitative factors, but as explicit sets of elementary, specific and measurable variables in ratio scales. This significantly improves the acuity and discriminatory power in the analyses of creative ideas. The feature-attribute matrix approach and its matrix operators are conceptually consistent and complementary with key extant theories engineering design and creativity.

First to define and specify ideas as feature-attribute matrices. It is demonstrated that creative ideas, novel ideas and useful ideas can be analytically and unambiguously specified and measured for creativity. It is significant that verbose qualitative narratives will no longer be the exclusive means to specify creative ideas. Rather, qualitative narratives will be used to complement the matrix specifications of creative ideas. First to specify six creativity operators enabling matrix algebra to operate on idea-matrices as operands to generate new ideas. This capability informs and guides a person’s intuition. The myth and dependency, on non-repeatable or non-reproducible serendipity, flashes of “eureka” moments or divine inspiration, can now be vacated. Though their existence cannot be ruled out. First to specify matrix algebra and eigen-value methods of quantitative analyses of feature-attribute matrices to rank the importance of elementary variables that characterize factors of novelty, usefulness and creativity. Use of verbose qualitative narratives of novelty, usefulness and creativity as monolithic “lumpy” factors can now be vacated. Such lumpy narratives risk being ambiguous, imprecise, unreliable and non-reproducible, Analytic and quantitative methods are more reliable and consistent. First to define and specify a method of “attacking the negatives” to systematically pinpoint the improvements of an idea’s novelty, usefulness and creativity. This procedure informs and methodically guides the improvements of deficient ideas.

The phenomenon of creativity spans research topics across Marketing and Consumer Behavior. Interest in, and research on, creativity has grown over the past several decades. With this heightened attention comes the question of how best to conceptualize and measure creativity. This question is addressed by reviewing the conceptualizations and measures used in the psychological study of creativity. From this review, we build a framework by which to analyze papers from the Journal of Consumer Research and the Journal of Marketing Research. Based upon this analysis, we provide recommendations and best practices for future research. Of particular importance, we recommend the use of convergent problem-solving tasks in combination with ratings of novelty and usefulness reported separately. Such measures allow one to distinguish between instances of effective-creativity (when an idea is both novel and useful) and instances of quasi-creativity (when an idea is novel but lacks usefulness). The importance of the framework to research and analysis beyond the experimental paradigm is discussed.

This paper aims to identify two boundary conditions (consumption motive and claim set-size) affecting the effectiveness of an advertisement’s creativity.

Across two experiments, the authors find support for hypotheses using both hedonic vs utilitarian products (Study 1) and hedonic vs utilitarian decision goals within the same product category (Study 2).

Creativity is more effective for an advertisement when the consumption motive is utilitarian (vs hedonic). Further, using a larger claim set-size within an advertisement increases (decreases) the effectiveness of advertisement creativity for those with hedonic (utilitarian) consumption motives.

This research contributes to the creativity literature by showing when creativity matters depending on the consumption motive and claim set-size. In addition, this research expands the utilitarian vs hedonic consumption literature by highlighting another way in which these two motives differ. Finally, this study expands the claim set-size literature by demonstrating that the effects of claim set-size depend on both consumption motive and features of the ad (i.e. its level of creativity).

These findings help marketers manage their advertising budget more effectively and efficiently knowing when advertisement creativity matters and thus when to invest in creativity.

The present research is the first to explicitly study boundary conditions for when ad creativity matters and shows that creativity matters more (i.e. enhances persuasiveness of the ad and attitudes toward the ad) when the consumption motive is utilitarian, especially when ads have small claim set-size. Additionally, creativity matters for hedonic consumption contexts if the advertisement has a large claim size.